Physical therapy is often prescribed for patients as a program for rehabilitation following injury, sickness, a surgical operation, etc. But physical therapy programs often require a patient to perform a substantial amount of unsupervised exercise at home. As a result, patients sometimes do not perform the exercises properly or do not perform them at all.
Various approaches have been made to improve home therapy programs. These approaches include providing illustrations and text about the exercises to the patient. Other attempts include providing videos of models performing the exercise accompanied by stock narrations of the exercise. The illustrations, videos and text can be provided to the patient by email.
These approaches, however, have shortcomings. Patients often do not find the correct form of the exercise because the illustrations and video are not customized for each patient. Moreover, these approaches do not track whether the patient performed the prescribed exercises and performed them correctly. Accordingly, patients often do not benefit from the home exercise programs. Consequently, health insurance companies may expend money on physical therapy that is not effective.
In addition, physical therapy patients may also benefit by properly using other health care products or services in conjunction with their physical therapy programs. For example, a patient may recover more rapidly from a back injury if he or she sleeps in the proper position in the proper type of bed, uses a wheelchair properly, etc.
Accordingly, there exists a need for a method and system to facilitate the development of physical therapy programs that are tailored to a patient's condition. There also exists a need for a method and system that tracks whether the patient is performing the prescribed exercises at home and that provides instruction to the patient as to how to perform the exercise properly. Finally, there exists a need for a method and system to identify other health care products or services that may be helpful to a physical therapy patient.